Pathfinder 2E Is It Time for PF2 "Essentials"?

[CapnZapp]

<insights snipped>

Thank you for that post.

I think Paizo basically blew it.

They released a game that has serious presentation issues.

They released a game where minutae runs wild. Like, seriously, people still pretend like 2e is this cleaned-up much-improved game where everything's elegant and easy. But it's not. It just isn't. There's literally thousands of feats and items and whatnot that add arcane and byzantine little exceptions, or, worse, just exist to remove arcane and byzantine restrictions you would otherwise labor under.

They release a game that comes off as seriously not reading the market.

• The game doesn't trust the gamer, and removes a lot of choice just to ensure nobody gets too powerful. In theory a nice idea, but they strangled all the fun out of it except for a niche cadre of hardcore tacticians. (That the first year's worth of adventures are seriously lethal, with the so-called "intro" game pitching newly hatched heroes against an Ogre that stands a non-trivial chance of one-shot insta-killing any hero, let alone a weak or injured one, doesn't exactly help)
• They go "nah, WotC's strategy of fewer but more narratively significant releases is a fad" and doubles down by relentlessly flooding the market with THOUSANDS of feats when we already have like 800 in the CRB?!?!
• The game gives off some serious 4E vibes as if that game wasn't dropped by WotC like a hot turd. (It doesn't actually play like 4E, but damage is done)

Everything about the Pathfinder 2 market line so far screams a world where 5E simply doesn't exist, and where PF2 just has to beat 4E to claim the crown.

It breaks my heart to see.

Zapp

PS. And to acknowledge the original topic, no, obviously a 2.5 or Essentials edition will just fracture the already tiny marketshare further and not help at all. I don't think there's a solution, I'm afraid. Not unless Paizo has unlimited coffers, and can just pretend everything's fine for two years or so while they secretly design an actually good game and we get Pathfinder 3 in 2022-2023...

PS. If you're new to the thread and are wondering where my specifics are, or if I'm just swinging wildly without any substance, let me link to an earlier post of mine where I constructively outline what would be needed to "save" PF2:

Again, "PF2 isn't going well" is kind of the premise of the thread.

Maybe a better way to phrase the OPs question would be:

Let's assume Paizo decided to do a PF 2.5 - what changes would you make?
(completely sidestepping the "but is it doing poorly?" question)

Myself, I would:

• lighten the restrictions on the core structure of a character. I want a way to increase my character's Fortitude save at the expense of her Will save. Or maybe AC. Or Perception. Instead of just saying "no, you can't do it" make it happen even if you balance it conservatively.
• scrap the current thinking "let's reserve every last little bit of design space for the feats we sell". Having a high level character that still can't crawl reasonably fast, or can't climb and fight at the same time, or can't make decent jumps even though you're Legendary in Athletics... (because you didn't take the feats Quick Crawler, Combat Climber, or Cloud Jumper) It's just so much more natural (intuitive and fun) if these basic improvements come with higher proficiency levels for free. Every hero that's legendary in Acrobatics should be able to pull off cool stunts without having to remember to take a whole slew of obscure low-level feats!
• In fact, the entire "let's turn on the fire-hose spewing feats faster than anyone can play them" idea is deeply unsatisfactory, so each and every feat should be scrutinized: if there are three or five feats doing nearly exactly the same thing, just with minute variations, then combine them into one single feat (so you don't need to remember slightly different rules just because you're playing this class instead of that class). Paizo likes to brag about how they have cleaned up the rules mess that was PF1, but nobody seems to realize PF2 is nearly as bad, with load and LOADS of little niggly rules differences between feats and abilities that should have worked identically because they should all have referenced one and the same thing! First assignment: scrap HALF of the over 2,000 feats that currently exist. (I am absolutely certain the game would be better off if there were just 500 feats - as if that's a low number - but that selection might be actually hard so let's start with something simple like just erasing every other feat...)
• Next item on the agenda: little niggly conditionals. Getting a +1 is too mathy for 5th Edition, but that in itself is okay for Pathfinder 2. But the problem is, there are loads and loads of items and abilities that only give you that +1 on a Saturday, or when you dress in yellow but not in green. Get rid of all the conditionals no sane player will ever bother with. Don't assume the game is played by veritable living computers! Magic items are especially egregious culprits here.
• So let's discuss PF2 magic items. Simply but, they're boring as hell. In fact, they remind me of 4E magic items, and boy, is that not a flattering comparison. I remember when DMing 4E I tried combining two supposedly-awesome items into one, and they were still forgotten by the players. Getting a +1 is noice if you can record it on your character sheet and forget about it. Getting a +1 that only works if you're Expert in this skill, and have taken this specific action just prior, and you can only use it once a day, and then only with this or that restriction...? Hell no, just drop that like a hot turd. Remembering the specific conditions for half a dozen items because they only give their bonus at exactly the right time? Yeah, if that bonus is awesome! For a +1 that likely won't matter in the slightest? No. Just no.
• So the entire roster of magic items in PF2 needs to be deleted, and Paizo needs to bring in a designer of 3E or 5E items where getting the item actually matters. Where players actually care to remember to use them (often because there's nothing to remember, you just get an awesome power or bonus!)
• While you're at it, the idea to keep fundamental runes as items needs to die. It feels wonky as hell. Magic items works best when players are happily surprised when they get 'em. Not when they feel not having them is a curse and getting them is an obligation. Anything the system expects the heroes to have it should give them automatically.
• And while you're at this, the idea to have every desirable item as a trivially transferred rune needs to be restricted to a variant. It's no fun when you continuously see your players strip every cool item you give them for their runes, which they immediately transfer to their existing weapons. I understand that for PFS (tournament play) purposes, this is almost a necessity, but for home campaigns, "free runes" should never have been the default rule. Instead, the wisdom is: don't make abilities that are specific to individual weapons. The 5E devs learned this early in that game's lifespan when they made an UA with feats like "+1 to Hammers" and the response was overwhelmingly negative. Don't force the Fighter to specialize in, "swords" or "polearms"! This only makes it impossible to hand out a magic axe, since the Fighter will not want to use it! If there ever was a character class whose feature should be "can use ALL weapons" it should be the Fighter. And Paizo even markets the class as such, but then immediately shot themselves in the foot by not giving the class "can switch specialization overnight" (until very high level I believe).
• Shields suffer another baffling implementation. It's far from immediately clear, but careful scrutiny reveals you have to choose: either pick a magic shield too frail to actually use (as a shield) or choose a shield sturdy enough to function as a shield (but then this sturdiness will be the shield's only "magical power")... Let me put it like this: if you describe shields with magical abilities as religious icons or amulets instead, fragile items you present to the enemy, everything falls into place as it now makes perfect sense why you need to hold them using one hand but still can't use them to shield you from incoming damage. (This example was intended to make you see how wonky the PF2 shield implementation really is)
• There are several rules subsystems that just are incredibly subpar. Medicine and Earn Income is each super complicated for no reason. (Or rather, they were written by a designer who mistake clutter for quality). Crafting and Recall Knowledge are two subsystems that are just broken-as-frak. (I've written entire threads about these and won't repeat that here) We've already mentioned how restrictive the three-action system is in practical play when you can't just wing it, and everything is locked down by a feat.
• Talismans deserves a special shoutout for being a rules system that actively fill me with rage. Yes, it's uniquely infuriating. It combines the worst tendencies of PF2 rules design in a single package. (No, nobody will ever bother spending that much time and attention on getting a minuscule bonus on a very specific action only once, and that often only to the character in the party that needs the bonus the least...)
• Consumables are horribly overpriced. The intent seems to be "giving one-time bonuses is unbalancing so players should only be given the consumables we place as loot"... and that's exactly the result when playing. You basically never purchase a one-time bonus when you can purchase a permanent upgrade for just four times the price. Healing potions are a joke. Spend two actions and a lot of gold on getting an entirely inadequate amount of healing? Yeah, no. In combat, use a Cleric. Out of combat, use Medicine. This is a perfect example of where it feels like one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. The healing potions feel like they're written up by a designer completely unaware of what the Medicine skill designer is doing.
• Slotted spells are just too weak at low level. (Playing a Wizard becomes truly fun at around level 11...)
• If you routinely need to rest for 30-60 minutes between encounters, the supposedly fun minigame of choosing your ten-minute activities ("should I repair my shield or regain a Focus point") just never becomes relevant since you always go "I'll do all of 'em".
• Cantrips are bewilderingly badly balanced. On one hand you have Electric Arc which deals half damage on a miss and can very often target two people. On the other hand you have a slew of attack spells where you often miss (low level casters are shite at hitting things. And since their cantrips are ranged attacks they can't benefit from extremely vital low-level bonuses like flanking) and do nothing. What were they thinking...?
• That individual classes and abilities can be bad is not something I'll dock the game points for. Every game has that. Still, attack spells and Alchemists deserve a do-over in a Pathfinder 2.5... In fact, in order to polish the spell list here's what I'd do. I'd read the internet guides on spells (Wizard Guide, Cleric Guide and so on) that fans have created for the game. Then I'd list every spell that three guides list as red (the color used for spells everybody agree are useless traps), and upgrade that spell. Instantly you'd easily have 20% more spells to choose from! (I'd do that with orange or purple spells too, the colors commonly used for subpar or special-use spells, but with a little more care obvs)
• I really recommend Paizo to find a replacement for Incapacitation. There are sooo many spells that are just rendered useless for player characters by having Incapacitation. (They're still great for BBEGs!) The tendency to "fix" it by adding spells that have useful outcomes even on a failure is a nuisance, since they make it impossible to just remove Incapacitation. But since this is a new revision of the game, Paizo can pay a designer to come up with a fix that doesn't come across as so incredibly heavy-handed. Basically the game needs to offer - at least as a variant - a way to select "protected" NPCs by narrative needs and not strictly by level or other game stats. (Akin to how in 5E you can elect to make any monster "Legendary" if you wish)
• Paizo really needs to offer official support for people wishing to use the game for traditional games where resource attrition is a thing. That is there should be a variant detailing all the changes you need to make (beginning with nerfing free healing aka Medicine), and maybe doubling everybody's health by calling Hit Points Wounds and adding an equal amount of easily-regained Vitality. (Btw, the current Wounds and Vitality variant in the GMG? Yep, over-engineered and cluttery just as usual...)
• Paizo really needs to recognize the unique difficulties presented to new GMs when it comes to encounter balancing, and specifically rebalancing on the spot. Very much unlike 5th Edition, you simply can't have two groups of monsters unite for safety from the pesky heroes - that's a given TPK in the making. But Paizo so far pretends encounter-building works much like in PF1, which simply is untrue. I find the selection of variant rules deeply unsatisfactory since they don't really allow for playing the game in new (or old) modes. It's all too focused on PFS and AP play.

So there you have it. A long list I know. It should not obscure the truly great things about the game: the three action combat system actually works (as long as you focus on combat and not things like opening doors or fighting on cliff sides...), the quality of monsters and their abilities is far superior to 5E, and... well, that's it, but since combat against monsters is the bread and butter for games in the Gygax family, that's alright.

Zapp

I can understand if you share the reaction I got at the time: "but that's so many changes it's just a new game"... which is the point. Cheers

 

[Desdichado]

Everything about the Pathfinder 2 market line so far screams a world where 5E simply doesn't exist, and where PF2 just has to beat 4E to claim the crown.

It breaks my heart to see.

To be fair, I'm not sure that I understand exactly what the typical Pathfinder customer actually wants. I started playing 3e when it was new, and it brought me back to D&D specifically when I had previously expressed little interest in D&D for many years, wandering around in other systems on some kind of quixotic Grail Quest for my ultimate game or system or whatever. And for the most part, I was pretty happy with 3e (including 3.5.) As the 3e era was coming to a close, I was still playing 3e, although I had long decided that I had some issues with it, especially at higher than mid-level. And I watched the whole 4e and Pathfinder launches, but as a guy who was still mostly playing 3e for a while, until my gaming group all moved around and lost touch with each other.

From my perspective, neither 4e nor Pathfinder fixed the problems that I had with 3e; in fact, they both went the opposite direction, although in radically different fashion from each other, and made most of the problems I had with the system worse, not better. Not to suggest that there weren't some interesting developments within the Pathfinder system, especially as we got to subsequent rules books, new classes, ideas like archetypes, etc. Although it always struck me that all of that could have been implemented on top of 3e. I was never really quite sure who the market was for the Pathfinder system specifically, or why they needed a new system that was 3e... except even more 3e-ish, if that makes sense. I've long suspected that the Paizo fanbase was a combination of people who didn't care as much about the system, but who really like the adventure path model and wanted more of that, and people who felt let down by the direction WotC was going with 4e, and wanted an alternative that was going to publish stuff that "felt like" D&D to them in ways that 4e did not, and people who just kinda stuck their gamer identity on being Paizo guys, or something. I feel like few of them really needed a new system, and mostly only picked it up because without it, they weren't going to be able to continue to consume Paizo adventure paths as easily. Plus, like I said, the system did do some clever stuff here and there.

But given that I don't understand and am sceptical of the system wants of the typical Pathfinder player and their demands from a system, I admit to being even more confused by the launch of 2e and who exactly it's meant to cater to. I don't pretend to know the system well, or understand how it plays, but it's clearly quite a bit different than 3e, which was the core conceit of Pathfinder in the beginning, and the key to their attracting their initial player base; people who wanted to play something much more like 3e than 4e. It's also clearly quite different than 5e... and that's probably smart; if you're going to compete with 5e, at least stake out some territory that's not too similar to it.

But I suspect that 5e competed head to head with Pathfinder 1e for the exact same demographic; people who wanted an experience much more like 3e than 4e. Whereas Pathfinder didn't fix many of the problems with 3e, and in fact exacerbated them, 5e made a deliberate effort to be "like 3e but without many of its problems." That's gotta have been hard for Paizo; 4e didn't really directly compete for the same segment as Pathfinder, because the segment of players who played Pathfinder were exactly those who didn't like the kind of game that 4e was. But 5e did, and it did so pretty well and effectively, it appears. So, they needed to release a 2e—but who exactly is the segment that 2e caters to? I'm not sure; honestly, I don't know the system well enough, and I'm pretty out of touch with what kinds of vocal "factions" there are in D&D player segmentation anymore. But the fact that I can't really readily identify a segment that 2e is catering to is, to me, a somewhat worrying sign for the business model of Paizo. If they don't have a segment that they're clearly catering to, and that will be the obvious customers for 2e, then who's going to get into it? Just the people who do whatever Paizo does because it's Paizo? Plus a few others here and there who like the system for whatever other reason? I dunno. I'm just not quite sure where 2e's place in the market is.

 

[payn]

Its pretty easy actually to see what market PF2 caters to. Paizo has been quite up front about it. No bounded accuracy so low level enemies get lost in the rearview as PCs level up. PCs more zero to God than 5E offers. More chargen and building choices or seemingly so than 5E. A system that supports play easily from level 1-20 (this is not a comparison to 5E but to PF1 which is a PITA to run high level.)

You can debate if Paizo delivered or not on those items, but that is what Paizo is going for. Some folks think 5E is like slow pitch softball, they would rather have fast pitch softball. How big is that market? Not sure, also debatable.

 

[transmission89]

To be fair, I'm not sure that I understand exactly what the typical Pathfinder customer actually wants. I started playing 3e when it was new, and it brought me back to D&D specifically when I had previously expressed little interest in D&D for many years, wandering around in other systems on some kind of quixotic Grail Quest for my ultimate game or system or whatever. And for the most part, I was pretty happy with 3e (including 3.5.) As the 3e era was coming to a close, I was still playing 3e, although I had long decided that I had some issues with it, especially at higher than mid-level. And I watched the whole 4e and Pathfinder launches, but as a guy who was still mostly playing 3e for a while, until my gaming group all moved around and lost touch with each other.

From my perspective, neither 4e nor Pathfinder fixed the problems that I had with 3e; in fact, they both went the opposite direction, although in radically different fashion from each other, and made most of the problems I had with the system worse, not better. Not to suggest that there weren't some interesting developments within the Pathfinder system, especially as we got to subsequent rules books, new classes, ideas like archetypes, etc. Although it always struck me that all of that could have been implemented on top of 3e. I was never really quite sure who the market was for the Pathfinder system specifically, or why they needed a new system that was 3e... except even more 3e-ish, if that makes sense. I've long suspected that the Paizo fanbase was a combination of people who didn't care as much about the system, but who really like the adventure path model and wanted more of that, and people who felt let down by the direction WotC was going with 4e, and wanted an alternative that was going to publish stuff that "felt like" D&D to them in ways that 4e did not, and people who just kinda stuck their gamer identity on being Paizo guys, or something. I feel like few of them really needed a new system, and mostly only picked it up because without it, they weren't going to be able to continue to consume Paizo adventure paths as easily. Plus, like I said, the system did do some clever stuff here and there.

But given that I don't understand and am sceptical of the system wants of the typical Pathfinder player and their demands from a system, I admit to being even more confused by the launch of 2e and who exactly it's meant to cater to. I don't pretend to know the system well, or understand how it plays, but it's clearly quite a bit different than 3e, which was the core conceit of Pathfinder in the beginning, and the key to their attracting their initial player base; people who wanted to play something much more like 3e than 4e. It's also clearly quite different than 5e... and that's probably smart; if you're going to compete with 5e, at least stake out some territory that's not too similar to it.

But I suspect that 5e competed head to head with Pathfinder 1e for the exact same demographic; people who wanted an experience much more like 3e than 4e. Whereas Pathfinder didn't fix many of the problems with 3e, and in fact exacerbated them, 5e made a deliberate effort to be "like 3e but without many of its problems." That's gotta have been hard for Paizo; 4e didn't really directly compete for the same segment as Pathfinder, because the segment of players who played Pathfinder were exactly those who didn't like the kind of game that 4e was. But 5e did, and it did so pretty well and effectively, it appears. So, they needed to release a 2e—but who exactly is the segment that 2e caters to? I'm not sure; honestly, I don't know the system well enough, and I'm pretty out of touch with what kinds of vocal "factions" there are in D&D player segmentation anymore. But the fact that I can't really readily identify a segment that 2e is catering to is, to me, a somewhat worrying sign for the business model of Paizo. If they don't have a segment that they're clearly catering to, and that will be the obvious customers for 2e, then who's going to get into it? Just the people who do whatever Paizo does because it's Paizo? Plus a few others here and there who like the system for whatever other reason? I dunno. I'm just not quite sure where 2e's place in the market is.

You’re making the same mistake as others before in assuming paizo is interested in going head to head with wotc. They aren’t. No RPG can effectively compete with d&d for market share for any sustained amount of time (various factors have resulted in that occurring in the past).

To Mark their reduced market share as a failure is a rather misguided assumption. Repeating the same argument as nauseam: many successful RPGs are statistically insignificant compared to d&d in the market space. this does not mean they are failures (see wfrp, swn, ose etc).

As has been stated above, the market is self evident from their strategy: Those who want a gameplay experience that is more granular and detailed than 5e, but not necessarily the complexity and baggage of a 3.x system. In that, they have succeeded (you can achieve much of the good stuff of the original pf with pf2, without having to account for all the ways it was bolted on to 3.x as it’s now built into the system from the ground up).

Many enjoy this level of detail and flexibility of build choice in their game. Some don’t (very clearly voiced further up. Repeatedly. On various threads. Over and over. To an almost trollish level).

Paizo are clearly happy with their approach at the moment and indeed , many boards and those in the Reddit community indicate a large degree of consumer satisfaction, including those that are coming over from 5e because they want a bit more in their role playing experience.

 

[Desdichado]

Well, that's an interesting observation. It suggests that, assuming my segmentation descriptions are even kinda sorta correct, that the segment that preferred a more 3e-ish approach, but which needed a bunch of problems fixed, is further split into those who don't think 5e "did it right" and those who did. Those who want a crunchier fix to 3e than 5e offers, maybe, or who dislike a core design assumption of 5e or something. Huh.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Its pretty easy actually to see what market PF2 caters to. Paizo has been quite up front about it. No bounded accuracy so low level enemies get lost in the rearview as PCs level up. PCs more zero to God than 5E offers. More chargen and building choices or seemingly so than 5E. A system that supports play easily from level 1-20 (this is not a comparison to 5E but to PF1 which is a PITA to run high level.)

You can debate if Paizo delivered or not on those items, but that is what Paizo is going for. Some folks think 5E is like slow pitch softball, they would rather have fast pitch softball. How big is that market? Not sure, also debatable.

The problem is that PF2e, like 4e, has diverged sufficiently from the core D&D experience (what that exactly is varies from person to person and is difficult to verbalize) to leave a lot of people cold. It's like D&D in the sense of having your goblins, ogres, chromatic dragons, healing clerics, and so on, yet still quite enough unlike it on a structural level that it doesn't really feel like a new edition of the game.

 

[Desdichado]

You’re making the same mistake as others before in assuming paizo is interested in going head to head with wotc. They aren’t. No RPG can effectively compete with d&d for market share for any sustained amount of time (various factors have resulted in that occurring in the past).

To Mark their reduced market share as a failure is a rather misguided assumption. Repeating the same argument as nauseam: many successful RPGs are statistically insignificant compared to d&d in the market space. this does not mean they are failures (see wfrp, swn, ose etc).

No, that's not a mistake. Sometimes you don't choose whether to go head to head or not; it's a choice that's made for you. From a historical perspective, its very clear that the segment that pursued Paizo were those who wanted only iterative updates to 3e, and not the revolutionary premise of 4e. 4e caused them to balk, and they were happy that someone like Paizo stepped in to fill the gap. But if 5e offers a (debatable premise, but I think one that many will shrug and accept because relative to 4e, it's mostly true) an iterative fix to 3e, while kinda sorta saying, "yeah, sorry about 4e; I can see that that wasn't really what you were interested in" then WotC was clearly choosing to compete head to head with Paizo for a segment that Paizo had captured from WotC some years earlier. What Paizo is interested in doing has no relevance to that situation, because their hand was forced by WotC, and they needed to address that in some fashion.

In any case, let me put my cards on the table. I don't care what system Paizo releases their adventure paths under; l can read and utilize them in my game, if I were to, whether they're 5e or Pathfinder 2e or 1e, or D&D or 3e or 4e or AD&D, or anything else. I'm just using them as a buffet, and taking concepts and ideas and maybe maps and scenario ideas from them and using them in my own preferred system anyway. So whether or not Pathfinder 2e finds a segment or not is of no concern to me personally other than that for various reasons I'd like to see Paizo stick around and continue to publish adventure paths that I can choose to go pick up if the concept appeals to me.

And this is where I go out on a limb a bit though; I personally suspect that it is very debatable that Paizo will be able to create a new segment of former 3e-style fans who want a different approach to fixing the 3e-Pathfinder 1e system than what 5e has done. It becomes the classic definition of a fantasy heartbreaker at this point. This is especially ironic if the comment somewhere way up above has any merit; that the direction Pathfinder 2e went relative to 1e is similar "in feel" to that taken by 4e (personally, I think the radical changes to the implied setting turned off more people about 4e than the mechanics, to be honest. Although both were factors. Only one is a factor with Pathfinder, of course.)

I also, and this is the google search that brought me to this thread in the first place, am intrigued by Paizo kinda adopting a soft approach to metastory again, which has obviously fallen considerably out of favor with the RPG market in general. It's a softer approach than that taken by the big metastory games of the past, like Old World of Darkness or whatever, but if you have a campaign set in Lastwall or Absalom, or was built around a concept utilizing the Worldwound, you may or may not appreciate that the 2e material says that your setting element no longer exists, or otherwise had a radical change done to it.

And finally, it's my opinion that Paizo were probably mistaken to pursue an alternative system in the first place, when their entire business model was based on catering to the segment that didn't want to migrate from 3e to 4e. I think that their strategy would have been better served by offering their Ultimate Campaign and Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Horror and Occult Adventures, etc. rules systems as Unearthed Arcana templates or options on top of the d20 SRD, and the "Pathfinder game" should have been a retroclone-like version of the SRD. I think that they had a hard decision to make about what to do there, and in retrospect, split their own segment into those who were OK advancing from 3.5 to Pathfinder and those who were more interested in sticking with 3.5. I'm not sure if that's "fixable" now, but had they done that, they could easily have pivoted to supporting the 5e SRD, and rather than competing with WotC for that segment, they could have just sold to that same segment.

Of course, there's also micro-segmentation going on here too. Is the hardback setting/module approach of 5e a model that's gradually replacing the adventure path model? That's a discussion that's a different tangent altogether.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No, that's not a mistake. Sometimes you don't choose whether to go head to head or not; it's a choice that's made for you. From a historical perspective, its very clear that the segment that pursued Paizo were those who wanted only iterative updates to 3e, and not the revolutionary premise of 4e. 4e caused them to balk, and they were happy that someone like Paizo stepped in to fill the gap. But if 5e offers a (debatable premise, but I think one that many will shrug and accept because relative to 4e, it's mostly true) an iterative fix to 3e, while kinda sorta saying, "yeah, sorry about 4e; I can see that that wasn't really what you were interested in" then WotC was clearly choosing to compete head to head with Paizo for a segment that Paizo had captured from WotC some years earlier. What Paizo is interested in doing has no relevance to that situation, because their hand was forced by WotC, and they needed to address that in some fashion.

I think the last part of this most likely makes a misread of the situation; PF2e wasn't about 5e.

I don't mean 5e didn't have any weight in how planning worked on PF2e, but its actual core cause was simpler: PF1e had reached its natural life cycle end. Every edition of a game system does that, and an examination of the product lines for PF2e shows they'd pretty much fished in damn near ever pond related to the line they could.

At that point a product either dies by trailing off into irrelevance or by being actively discontinued, or a company does a new edition. And when doing new editions, the designers always have two fundamental choices: change things only minimally, and hope your market will actually buy into, essentially, repurchasing the same damn game, or take the mechanics in some degree of new places.

Paizo chose the latter. The question ends up being whether that was the most useful thing to do, and whether the specifics were the best choice they could have had.

The latter can be no more than a subjective call on the part of almost anyone, certainly anyone but Paizo whether some want to claim to the contrary or not.

The former, however, can at least approached logically.

If they had stayed too close to PF1e, there would be a different, but equally consistent complaint; its always the case when that happens. It certainly wouldn't have done anything about the problematic areas of 3e that PF1e was heir to, and people who were drifting away to 5e (because at least it has different problem areas) would likely have continued to do so anyway.

The only people they most likely would have kept that they've lost now (and those are most likely simply sticking with PF1e, as D&D 5e isn't likely to be serving them any better) were those who liked all the detailed character creation but were also tolerant of (or actively preferred) the character creation mini-game where characters were could be wound up into engines of destruction during creation and advancement while others weren't so baked (and there are a couple people on the Paizo forums who've outright indicated this and its consequences are what they miss about PF2e). But there's no reasons to assume that group is larger than the one that stuck around because PF2e went in a different direction.

What one can say with a pretty fair certainty is nothing they would have done would have made them really be competing on the same level with D&D 5e. As I've noted multiple times, Paizo's ability to do that during the 4e period was a historical accident; they took advantage of it, but it was not repeatable. All they were going to be able to do was produce sales sufficient to justify their own expectations, and any suggestion PF2e hasn't done that is based on metrics that are, at best, flawed; they only people who really know are Paizo themselves, and likely no one else at all has access to the necessary data.

 

[payn]

The problem is that PF2e, like 4e, has diverged sufficiently from the core D&D experience (what that exactly is varies from person to person and is difficult to verbalize) to leave a lot of people cold. It's like D&D in the sense of having your goblins, ogres, chromatic dragons, healing clerics, and so on, yet still quite enough unlike it on a structural level that it doesn't really feel like a new edition of the game.

I dont disagree with you, I was just pointing out why PF2 isnt a 5E clone. Trying to differentiate itself even further from D&D helps in this effort to offer an alternative. The question then, is there a market and is PF2 what that market wants?

 

[Desdichado]

@Thomas Shey ; ah, so your position is that 1e's treadmill lifecycle was over and that they couldn't continue to find meaningful supplements to make and sell for it anymore is really the primary (or at least a significant) factor in the 1e to 2e migration. I admit, that hadn't occurred to me at all, but now that you mention it, that does seem kind of obvious, doesn't it? Now we get to have Occult Adventures, Horror Adventures, Ultimate Intrigue, Ultimate Combat, etc. all over again, but in 2e this time. Hmm...